AFTEREFFECTS: NAJAF

By SUSAN SACHS

Published: May 22, 2003

NAJAF, Iraq—
The sprawling cemetery that surrounds this city is called the Valley of Peace, a striking misnomer for a place that has known so much violent death.

Over 14 centuries, its boundaries advanced methodically, keeping pace with the normal rhythm of life and death. But in one decade of Saddam Hussein's rule, the cemetery expanded to eight times its previous size to accommodate the casualties of war and repression.

Its humble stone tombs, sun-bleached to the color of sand, tell just a few of the stories of Iraqi suffering. Only now, after the collapse of Mr. Hussein's government, are people in Najaf able to recount the events of those years to outsiders.

Raadi Hussein, a lean toothless man of 65, was reluctant to talk at first about the bloodshed he had witnessed and the bullet-torn bodies he had helped bury in unmarked graves.

Finally, encouraged by a circle of rapt young men who gathered around him in the shade of one of the old shrines, Mr. Hussein, the keeper of the graveyard, spoke about ''the days of chaos.''

Some of the worst, he said, were in early 1991.

The Iraqi Army had been driven out of Kuwait by American-led forces. In the days following the surrender, Shiite Muslims in southern cities like Najaf launched a rebellion against Mr. Hussein, killing Baath Party officials and burning government buildings.

Members of the Baath government ran into the cemetery, where they were pursued and shot by the rebels hop-scotching among the closely packed tombs. The bodies had not yet been removed before the Iraqi Army regrouped to retaliate.

For 15 days, the insurgents tried to hide among the graves and inside the underground crypts. The Valley of Peace shook with gunfire and mortar rounds.

The carnage was nothing short of sacrilege. The Najaf cemetery is the holiest of all resting places for the world's 170 million Shiite Muslims. Nearby is the revered Imam Ali shrine, the presumed burial spot of Ali, the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law.

It was Ali's thwarted bid to succeed the prophet that caused the great schism in Islam. His followers came to be known as the Shiites, who split from the main body of Muslims, or Sunnis.

Adding to the sanctity of the area is another Shiite conviction -- that Ali is buried in the same spot as the Biblical figures Adam and Noah. Two other early Islamic prophets, Hood and Saleh, are also thought to be buried in the Valley of Peace, under a dome of colorful mosaics near the entrance of the graveyard.

Shiites also believe that the Biblical patriarch Abraham passed through the area that is now the city of Najaf and made a prophecy: that one day a tomb would be built on the site that would draw tens of thousands of people to paradise.

The presence of so many venerated tombs and so much religious history only sharpened the pain of the fighting in the cemetery in 1991.

''When the shelling was over, there were bodies everywhere around the graves,'' recalled Raadi Hussein, the guardian of the shrines. ''The army finally gave us permission to bury the dead. They opened up a big hole and we put them in there.''

All of them, about 200 people in all, were tossed into the same pit -- whether soldier, rebel or Baathist.

Later, in the calm following the storm of killing, families from town crept into the cemetery at night to remove the bodies of their relatives and bury them separately.

''It was a sad time,'' Mr. Hussein said softly. ''There was crying. Yes, lots of crying.''

But more grief was to come.

Two months after the battle, the Iraqi Army returned, this time with bulldozers. Methodically, the soldiers plowed through the closely packed headstones, crushing ornately carved stone memories into powder.

When they finished, a grid of 50 new streets cut through the eighth-century graveyard, wide enough for a future military incursion.

''They went through the graves area by area, paving new streets over the tombs so they wouldn't have another problem like that again,'' Mr. Hussein said. ''They wanted to be able to get inside with their equipment to find people hiding here.''

The demolishing of the tombs left scars in a cemetery that had grown tremendously over the previous decade because of another of the Saddam government's military ventures.

During the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted most of the 1980's, the dead arrived at such a clip that Mr. Hussein and the gravediggers could barely keep up.

''Sometimes we could have 100 families a day coming to bury their sons,'' the graveyard sentinel said. ''We'd get so many, especially during the big ground assaults. Soldiers killed in battle. Soldiers executed, too, by their officers.''

Over the course of the war, the Valley of Peace grew from about 250 acres to more than 2,000 acres. ''It just kept filling up,'' Mr. Hussein said. With the fall of the government, the graveyard has started to yield more of its secret memories.

This month, an old man from town came forward to admit his role in hiding the bodies of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, a noted Najaf Shiite cleric, and his sister, Bint al-Huda, who were executed in 1980.

The government had never revealed the location of their graves, apparently to prevent them from becoming pilgrimage sites.

Now Mr. Hussein has helped place a temporary fence around the unmarked sliver of land where the two Sadrs lie.

''We will build a shrine for them,'' he said. ''Something for the people to visit. This is a holy place, you know.''

Photos: Left, a local resident stood in a Wadi Salaam mausoleum last week. Right, Raadi Hussein is a cemetery guard, as were his father and grandfather. (Photographs by Alan Chin for The New York Times) Map of Iraq highlighting Najaf: Chaos struck the Najaf cemetery, a holy place to Shiites, in 1991.